ARIZONA CHRONICLES – FINI

The field adjoining our road began to look like an intricate ant farm lay on its side.  Dug into the earth was a complicated maze of tunnels for the houses that would be built upon them.  I began spending my days walking the paths, hidden in the earth with only the sun overhead.  There were so many changes from when we first moved in and I was not happy with any of them.

I climbed up on the side, my feet dangling down and stared at the red Sold on the realtor sign in our front yard.  It was leaning to the side from the one afternoon I walked up to it and kicked it over.  Fearing my mother’s wrath, I then picked it up and tried to right it.  The sign was a mocking reminder that some things cannot be undone.  Selling our house and moving back to Kentucky was one of them.

In the evenings, I would sit in the spare bedroom with my sister playing Barbies and looking longingly at the disassembled cardboard castle now perched against the wall.  Of all the rooms packed and ready for the move, our playroom was the saddest.  We no longer had cardboard walls to hide us from the real world as my sister and I pretended we belonged to a royal family.  She was so young, I think she was anxiously awaiting the day they would arrive to take us to our real home.

She was too young to understand we were leaving to never return.  Instead, she treated our move as if it was another road trip with diner scrambled eggs and dirty gas station bathrooms.  I envied her ability to laugh and be happy despite the inevitable.  Even then, I knew in my gut, instead of life improving, it would become harder.

The weeks leading to our move, my mother was angrier than ever before.  This was something my father could not fix, and I think she hated him for it.  He had a family to support and he felt he could do better in Kentucky.  I would also like to think her volatility came into play.  Although she viewed Arizona as her new home, she had never assimilated and was anything but happy.  Maybe he thought moving back to her family would fix her.  To this day, we have never discussed what happened in Arizona to her.

The morning we moved, the truck came and burly men packed our whole life into it.  I clung to my basketball, hoping for a last minute reprieve, but when my mother pried it from my hands and threw it in with our furniture, it was over.  I would no longer wander through the mountains near our home or slide down a hill of volcanic rocks.  I would never again taste the sweet nectar of the Indian paintbrush flower or listen to the coyotes howl at night.  I was saying goodbye to the fragrant alfalfa fields and a night sky full of diamonds.  There were bad things to remember, but there were also a lifetime of moments that would change the adult I might have been.

I walked to Daniel’s house.  We stood on his porch, our hands in our jean pockets and said our goodbyes.  His mother wiped tears from her eyes and gave me a hug that hurt my heart.  I promised to write Daniel and send postcards, but I never did.  Instead, I walked away from him, pausing only long enough to look back and give him a little wave.  My last memory of him is his dark eyes looking into mine as he raised his hand to return my wave.  Then he turned to go back inside.

My friends in the neighborhood told me awkward goodbyes.  I took one more peek at my babysitter’s room of Playgirl penises and Robbie gave me his favorite GI Joe to remember him by.  I lied and told him we would be back in a year.  This is just temporary, I reassured him.  A sweet lie, I thought.  I knew I would never see any of them again.  I never did find the GI Joe in any of the boxes.  I am certain it was thrown out at some point.

We flew back to Kentucky.  I swallowed the painful lump in my throat as the plane skimmed over a sea of white clouds.  There were hours of sitting in my seat, resisting the urge to scream and pretending to be excited to arrive in Kentucky.  Instead of being happy as I was swept into the arms of my aunts and uncles who cried happy tears we were home, I was lost and would remain lost for a long time.  For months, I carried a baggie of black rocks we had chiseled out of a mountainside when we first arrived.  They were that touchstone to what I left behind.

We moved in with my grandparents where we stayed for months until we rented a small house.  We would move several times, one house after another, never a home.  This nomadic wanderlust carried over to my adult life.  I have moved more times than I would like to count and never felt I belonged anywhere.  I had left my home.  It was not just a place; it was a state of mind.

My sister and I as adults talk about Arizona as if it were a shared dreamed.  She remembers less, but likes to hear the stories of our adventures there.  We prefer to file away the painful moments, the reality of what our family really went through.  We sit together and look through the pictures, capturing only a fraction of the moments etched on our brains.

I can close my eyes and see the tall sunflowers that grew beside our trailer.  I can put out my hand and feel myself petting my beloved dog Peppy who had come home to say goodbye.  He is still there, buried in the earth, beneath the sun he loved to lay in.  I can stand outside and inhale and it’s there.  That indefinable scent of the mountains, of the fresh water streams and of the heat in the soil.  I can throw my head back and taste the snowflakes on my tongue or the taste of freshwater from the springs we would swim in.  I can hear the wind blowing through the pine trees.  I am forever grateful even at a young age, I understood enough to take it all in, to hold it close because I would need it again.

There is no happy ending.  My mother did not move back to Kentucky and become happier.  My parents remained married, they weathered the storms of her depressions, and resigned themselves to the life they have chosen.  Just recently, she is once again a victim of her own life.  I watch my father, my heart breaking, sad that moving back did not fix all that was wrong with her.

As soon as I was old enough, I moved out on my own.  I worked hard and then I moved away.  I took my daughter on my journey just as my parents had taken me on theirs.  We lived in New York and she saw her first Broadway play.  We lived in Pennsylvania and went white water rafting and rock climbing.  We lived in Massachusetts and every weekend ventured out to the historic sites and the aquarium.  We lived in Rhode Island and she splashed in the cold water of the ocean and made a sand castle.  I’ve made sure her life, if not secured by belonging somewhere, was filled with memories to sustain the life she would want to build for herself.

Like my parents, I have returned to Kentucky, except this time I did not feel I was leaving anything of me behind.  I am still on that journey to find that home again.  I wish I could say it is wherever my daughter is, that would be the beautiful prosaic thing to claim.  My daughter is my life, but something else is a home for me.

I know I will find it again.  It is not out of reach.  I was offered an opportunity to move out West for work sometime in the future.  I felt a surge of something I wish I could describe.  One day I will stop moving around.  One day I will stop yearning.  One day, I will stand beneath that big sky and smile and be thankful for the journey that brought me there.  I know one day I am going to end up exactly where I am supposed to be.

This time, I will bring my daughter along and we will talk about the places we have lived and the life we have led.  Then one day, she will leave on her own journey.  There is something I‘ll make sure of, something I never had.  She may wander to find herself, but she will know I will have a home waiting for her.  Always waiting for her to find her way back.

ARIZONA CHRONICLES PART XI

My mother tightly coiled, always walking the fine line between despair and tension, began to unravel just before the holidays.  She began locking herself for long periods of time in the bathroom and I would stand in the hallway watching my sister push pictures beneath the slit of the door trying to cheer her up.  The part of me that used to care about whether or not she would open the door with a crooked smile and still sniffing tears had departed.  My compassion for my mother was replaced by anger.  I felt left alone to raise myself and my sister and angry with my father for not yelling at her to stop what she was doing.

When I left the house in the cool morning to go to school, I would no longer look back at my sister standing in the doorway, her fingers pressed against the glass as if beckoning me to take her with me.  I would tell her she was too little, but I also felt if she were home, nothing bad would happen to my mother that day.  When I was home, I refused to come out of my room unless it was dinnertime or my father insisted I come out and play.  I would count down the hours he was at home on the weekend, watching my mother pretend to be something other than what we saw during the days he was at work.  I roiled with anger and rampaged against whatever was happening in my house.

Then one day I arrived home to my fake grandmother making dinner and announcing my mother was in the hospital.  My father arrived later and told us it was an infected tooth.  She would be in the hospital for a little while.  It was as if someone had flung open the windows and fresh air was blowing through the curtains.  To this day, I am not sure what actually happened to my mother.  She was in the hospital for a week, we saw her exactly once, she burst into tears, and we were bustled from the room.

My father stumbled with being both mother and father.  He was unsure how to wash clothes and whites were suddenly tinged pink.  He cooked frozen pizzas for dinner, still slightly frozen in the center, but we ate happily anyway.  We built elaborate cities on the carpet with Popsicle sticks and went to bed leaving it there.  My mother would have balked at the idea.  I began insisting my sister take baths that consisted of more than splashing her face and laying out her pajamas for her nightly.  I cooked scrambled eggs for breakfast and burnt bacon and thought for the first time in a long time, there was nothing to worry about.

It snowed the morning my mother came home.  I remember standing in the door, watching the golf ball size flakes fall and blanket the morose brown ground we had refused to call a lawn.  In Kentucky, we were use to lush green grass sprinkled with dandelions and smelling sweet of earth.  I longed for the alfalfa fields next to our trailer when we first moved to Arizona.  I would run through them in my bare feet, the soft leaves tickling my ankles, lie down on a soft blanket of green, and watch the clouds.  Our yard at the house was nothing more than rocks and clumps of weeds.

My sister and I stood at the door calling for more snow.  When we first moved to the mountains, our first winter in Arizona, there had been enough snow for a snowman.  We had higher aspirations this time.  I thought an igloo was surely easy to build and we had a sled just waiting to be used for something other than dragging large rocks home from the dried up creek.  We stood watching the snowfall in our pajamas until my fake grandmother came in.  Dad muttered something about going to get our mother, and suddenly the snowfall lost its luster.

She arrived, looking thinner, but exactly the same.  She hugged us, told us how much she missed us and then went straight to bed.  My father doted on her, making her hot soup and bringing her the newspaper to read.  It is when I realized she was his other child.  The favorite one.  The one he had to tend to because she needed the most attention.  Instead of feeling jealousy, I felt saddened and resolute I would never need or want anyone to take care of me.

She was still too shaky for Thanksgiving dinner that year and we had it at my fake grandmother’s house.  My grandfather had been injured falling off a logging truck and there was talk of them returning to Kentucky.  Micah and I ate our dinners in lawn chairs beneath the carport.  It was freezing outside and there was still snow.  We watched Russ building a large bon fire in an empty drum, tossing in whatever sticks and paper he could find until it roared above his head.  Micah said he knew they would be leaving Arizona.  I told him I would be sorry to see him go, but glad to see Russ leave.  As we exchanged knowing glances, Russ threw two empty aerosol cans onto his fire and there was a sudden explosion.  The can tipped over and fire shot toward the carport.  When the smoke cleared, Russ stood there with singed hair and eyebrows, yet still smiling.  I could not wait for him to leave.

They moved away just before Christmas.  There were hugs and tears and at some point during the goodbye dinner, I hit Russ above the eye with a matchbox car.  All of the pictures we had in our photo album are of me smiling from ear to ear and Russ scowling with his eye swollen and turning purple.  It was my last goodbye gift to someone who would go on to cause damage in other people’s lives.  Micah and I cried, our shared experiences bonding us, yet things would never be the same.  We promised to write, but never did.  Out of sight, so they say.

With that, whatever family we had in Arizona was now gone.  There were friends, those my mother had yet to alienate, but we were ostensibly alone.  Christmas was a morose day of half heartedly opening presents and arguing between my parents.  There was a seismic shift in the plates of our lives, and I did not have a clue what it was.  My mother was torn between wanting to return to Kentucky and wanting to stay in Arizona where she felt truly at home.  I just wanted to get away.

Just after the holidays, my mother was in the hospital again.  She would be hospitalized several times as I grew up.  I often joked she had every organ remove you could spare to lose.  I will be honest and say I am not sure what it was that time in Arizona.  I am not sure my father even bothered with an excuse.  She was just simply in the hospital and then she was home again.  This pattern would play out through out our lives.

It was just before New Years, after mom was home and in bed again, the snow fell overnight.  A deep plush carpet of white covering our yard and our street.  I trudged out into it just as the sun rose and everywhere I looked there was just white.  I threw myself down in it, despite the cold and my thin coat, and made a series of snow angels.  I built a snowman with rocks for eyes and a mouth.  I threw snowballs at my bedroom window until my sister peeked out and then half dressed, joined me in the snow.  We laughed and played even as the sun grew hotter and our snowman began to melt.  This was what we had been waiting for, and it was perfect.  It made me believe if you waited long enough, those perfect moments would come; you just had to be patient.

ARIZONA CHRONICLES PART OCHO

The house was being built and I was miserable.  My best friend, Daniel no longer raided his mother’s jewelry box and brought me gifts.  He felt I should have control over where I lived, when in fact I had none.  I spent my days fawning over Dylan with the white hair and trying to keep up with the uncles who were barely older than I was.  I baked with my fake grandmother (she would forever be known as Dorothy as she had stolen my papa away from my granny) and waited until we moved into our house, which now had green exterior walls and a poured concrete foundation.

My parents in their euphoria did not notice their eldest was unhappy.  If they did, they simply could not acknowledge anything negative when so many positive things were happening to my family.  I, on the other hand, was becoming resentful and angry we were moving yet again and no amount of appendix scar attention could ease my suffering.

Even Dylan became tarnished with my newfound colorless view of life.  I would sit at my desk and seethe at his shallowness and the way the girls doted on him.  Was I really one of those girls?  When he called my name at lunchtime, I pretended to not hear him.  Instead, I sat on the football field with a book and retreated into a world that was not mine.  I was a festering cauldron of burgeoning female ready to blow at any moment.

There are things that happen in life.  You can look back and see them as you did as a child.  Worst possible moments of despair and pain, or you can see them for what they really were.  Just moments.  As you get older, you collect them like seashells in a plastic container and you’re not really sure why you still have them.  You keep meaning to throw them out, but you went through all the trouble of collecting them, surely they have some value.  They don’t.  Because every time you walk on a beach you will see there are more shells.  Just like moments.  There will be more.  Some of them wonderful, a few of them painful.

Arizona has become like that for me.  There were things that happened emblazoned in my brain.  Things I cannot always find humor in.  Every place I’ve moved, they were wrapped in bubble wrap and carried with me.  I could look back at Arizona as a place of pain, but it wasn’t.  There was the smell of alfalfa, the feel of the sun on my already bronze skin, the millions of stars I miss every time I look in the sky from somewhere else.  There was so much good, I refuse to let it be tainted by anything awful that happened.

At the time, I was too young to process how life cycles through these wonderful and miserable moments.  I was miserable and made more miserable by events occurring I felt I had no control over.  I hated the house and everything it stood for.  I hated everyone and every thing.  Except my dog, Peppy.  He was the one consistent thing in my life.

A fur faced ball of energy who would sit beside me and ponder the hopeless of the world, he was my companion in pain.  He understood when my parents were too self absorbed to.  He understood when no one around me saw me.  When he curled beside me, it was like a hug from someone who loved you despite your unpleasantness.

Then I came home from school and my father was not at work.  He was waiting for me at the gate and he put a hand on my shoulder.  He led me around the back of the trailer where a mound of dirt was covered with rocks we had found in the dried riverbanks of the Little Colorado River.  He explained a farmer had shot Peppy.  Probably chasing cattle at night.  He had made it home and died on our rickety wooden porch.  When dad had come home from work that night, he found him and buried him.

That morning, I had not been greeted by Peppy, and I remember looking around the yard for him.  He was off somewhere doing something and I had not given it a second thought.  He was always there when I came home from school.  But not anymore.  I remember standing, looking at that dirt mound, thinking of my Peppy dying alone in the dark on our porch.  I wondered if he had lain there, alone and cold, and wondered why I hadn’t come out to comfort him.  I had not been there for him when he needed me.  It made an already difficult time in my life unbearable.  If possible, I retreated further.  That unexpended rage had come what fueled me.  It was just a matter of time before it was unleashed somewhere, on someone.

My uncle, Russ was four years older than I was.  He was cocky and deranged in a future serial killer sort of way.  He made his brother, Micha’s life miserable and mine.  We hated him, loathed him.  There were things, things that I will never speak of.  Yet, we were powerless to him.  He was bigger and a bully and we cowered in his wake.

One day we were walking along the road up to the graveyard.  As morbid as it was, I did find comfort amongst the dead.  It was proof I wasn’t alone in losing someone.  I walked behind, watching Russ smash bugs beneath his sneakers and toss rocks at the lizards he came upon.  When he stopped at a ditch, retrieving a stick and began dragging something from its murky waters, I stopped too.

In horror, I watched him drag a freshly dead dog from the water.  Obviously, hit by a car and left to die.  He laughed in glee and suggested we autopsy it.  I became not myself that day.  Everything flashed as if it were happening to someone else.  Suddenly, I was standing over Russ who was lying in the road.  There was bright red blood spurting from the cut above his eye and I was panting and holding a rock.  I felt that rage unraveling from my belly and my body shook with it.

My parents punished me for hitting him.  There had been stitches.  I have many regrets in my life, but that was not one of them.  It wasn’t the act of violence, I would never condone such a thing, but it was my no longer standing there as a bystander to something horrible.  I had done something.  Maybe not the right thing, but I had done something.

He, of course, would retaliate against me in a hundred ways.  He would push me down in a ditch or into a barbed wire fences.  I would return with bruises and cuts, but I would never tell on him.  He would taunt me, call me names, and invoke the name of Peppy to try to hurt me.  However, he never did.  Whenever he seemed to get the upper hand, I would remember him that day lying on the road and crying.  Big tears of pain, surprise, and the fear in his eyes as I stood looming with that rock.  He was no longer a monster to fear, but a weak boy who would grow into an even weaker man.

I suddenly forgot about Daniel and Dylan and the dog grave we were leaving behind.  I was ready for a fresh start in a new house and I felt hopeful.

ARIZONA CHRONICLES PART SEVEN

There is a fine line between exposing one’s self and showing off an appendix scar.  I think I could be guilty of both as I unbuttoned my jeans and showed everyone the four-inch red incision line on my first day back to school.  There was a certain sense of pride that I had survived not only surgery, but an infection.  Not that I understood the implication of either.  I was the only one in my grade missing an organ, and that made me quasi-famous.

I did not lie, but neither did I correct the wild rumors.  Someone asked me if my guts exploded and I just held up my hand and told them I couldn’t really talk about it.  A girl from another grade said she heard I had died and was brought back to life.  I shrugged mysteriously and moved through the lunch line.  Suddenly there were new faces at my lunch table and they all wanted to know what it felt like to be sliced open.  I didn’t bother mentioning I was asleep.

Having surgery did slow me down.  Since they apparently used super glue to close my incision, I was afraid for months it would suddenly open to expose a gaping hole where my appendix had once been.  I was afraid to go down the slide, ride my bike or climb on the monkey bars.  I begged off jumping off sheds until I was certain I wouldn’t explode on impact.

It was during this hey day as a school celebrity, Dylan began noticing me.  He carried my lunch tray to my table.  He sat across from me and told me lame jokes.  He drug me behind the first grade trailer and asked to see my scar up close.  With a finger he gently touched the still tender wound and smiled at me.  My knees felt weak and I could barely speak, but I remember making an equally lame joke.  He laughed and my heart sang.  I sat in the classroom fantasizing about the beautiful flaxen hair children we would make.  My near death experience had convinced him what he had been missing.

Apparently, near death experiences aren’t nearly as interesting as a new girl in school.  How quickly I fell off my pedestal when the dark haired girl from the Navajo Reservation was suddenly thrust into our classroom.  She wore beaded bracelets and pulled her shiny black hair with leather ponytails.  She told stories of powwows and her traditional beliefs.  My organ pickling in a jar in some hospital was suddenly deemed not as worthy.  I watched as Dylan pulled on her ponytail and whatever daydreams of our life together were gone.  Apparently shiny new objects attracted him.

Dejected, I found solace with Daniel who had visited me in the hospital and brought me lifesavers.  He rode me on his bike and avoided potholes and bumps to keep my remaining organs intact.  He held up barbed wire fences so I could crawl under rather than over.  He stole heavy gold bracelets from his mother and slide them on my arms.  We would sit for hours on the edge of ditches they were building for underground utilities for the new houses being built.  Sometimes we would talk about general things or sometimes we would just sit and say nothing.  I didn’t know it then, but he understood me.

I came home one evening at my curfew of dusk.  It didn’t matter where we were, we just had to be home before dark.  As a kid living in the mountains, you didn’t bother arguing with that logic.  Just as the sun began to set, the howling of the coyotes and wolves began, and you wanted to be inside.  My father was home early from work and I thought this meant he had lost his job.  My stomach seized at the thought of living in something smaller than the tin can we called home.

Instead, he announced he had bought us a house.  Well, actually a plot of land they would be building a house on.  Three bedrooms he said excitedly and we will have two bathrooms.  My mind was on overdrive with the possibilities.  No more sharing a room with my sister!  No more arguing over bathroom time!  No more being trapped in a container so foggy with smoke we could barely see out the windows.

The best news, it was close to where we lived so I could still ride my bike to visit Daniel.  We would have our own yard and the Arizona equivalent of grass which was a dirty yard with sporadic tufts of weeds.  I remember my mother smiling and laughing for the first time in what felt like years.  She was happy to get out of the prison van too.  A brand new house, not in our wildest dreams did we ever think that was possible.  I was already picking out paint colors for my room.

I excitedly told Daniel about the move and he frowned.  I wasn’t going to be that far away, but we could no longer just walk across the street to see each other.  I would have neighbors and would probably be riding bikes with them.  He was angry at me for allowing myself to be moved.  As he stormed away in a huff, I stood there on the dirt road feeling confused.  How could someone be happy and sad at the same time?  My child mind couldn’t wrap itself around that.  Why did something have to be taken away in order to gain something else?

I cried myself to sleep that night, not sure if it was out of joy or sadness.

ARIZONA CHRONICLES PART SEIS

I remember words and phrases that sounded like “surgery,” “infection,” and “rectal exam.”  I was bent over and violated by a sympathetic doctor who then told my mother my appendix had burst and I was to be admitted.  I stood in line at admitting.  The pain was throbbing in my right side and I did not fully grasp what was to occur.  My mother was crying and all I could care about was the pain ending.

At one point the pain was so severe, I just remember blacking out and waking up in a gown and having an IV inserted into my hand.  The nurse looked at my mother who was crying hysterically at my side and rolled her eyes.  I smiled at her and she smiled back.  I’ll never forget that kind face and the pat she gave me on my head.  “You’re going to be just fine.”  She said, and I believed her.

Coincidentally, or maybe not if you believe in destiny, the surgeon who would be removing what was left of my appendix was from my hometown.  This dried my mother’s tears.  I thought they had flown someone in especially from Kentucky to cut me open.  For a brief shining moment I felt special.  This was quickly dashed when they gave me a shot of medicine that set my veins on fire and I found myself drifting to peaceful sleep.

My eyes opened to a nurse calling my name and gently shaking me.  My throat hurt and I could taste rubbing alcohol.  I could feel a throb in my side and asked if I had stitches.  I was disappointed they had glued the incision shut instead of cool black sutures I could show off.  She promised there would be a scar, so it wasn’t a total loss.

I was in the hospital for a week due to the infection.  What transpired was an endless string of meals consisting of jello and broth.  To this day, I still cannot stand jello.  The food was just this side of bearable compared to my mother’s dinners, so I didn’t complain.  There were visitors to entertain and gifts to accept.  My sister was not allowed to visit in the hospital, so she was taken to the movies by my father.  I still bring this up as practically child neglect.  How dare he choose to take her to the movies while my life was hanging on by a thread.

Then I was expelled from the hospital in a wheelchair and told I would be out of school for a couple more weeks.  I didn’t like school anyway, so this was just the news I was waiting for.  I was tucked in a bed with magazines and a radio and told to take it easy.  If I had more organs to donate, I would have surely volunteered them.  Even my mother seemed to have softened due to the guilt of almost sending her oldest child to school to die from sepsis.  I would take away from this experience a hard lesson.  The special treatment didn’t last long.  Queen for the day was a fleeting crown.

Within a week my mother was crawling out of her skin having to tend to her sick child and my little sister who did not understand I needed to rest.  Instead, she wanted to hear stories and touch my scar and share popsicles with me.  I think this was an important time for our bonding.  We became close and I feared she would inherit my incredible bursting appendix.  I became a little mother to her, and she was happy to have me around.  My mother, on the other hand, was ready to have her life back that included watching the Price is Right in peace.

I was ready to run and play myself.  I missed my friends and was anxious to be out of the house and in the fresh air.  I’m sure this extended period of togetherness forever altered my relationship with my mother.  She was already on the edge and to have a child have emergency surgery then be underfoot for almost a month must have been a lot to take.  I think maybe she resented me for the imposition on her already tenuous hold on her sanity.  It didn’t get any better after that.

ARIZONA CHRONICLES PART 5

So, I could overcome the heat, dust storms and fatality around every corner because I was in love with two boys at the tender age of eight.  They were like photograph negatives of each other.  Dylan all blonde and light skinned, Daniel with his dark hair and dark eyes.  They also had very different opinions of me.  Dylan completely ignored my every word and attempt to make eye contact and Daniel would steal his mother’s jewelry and hand it to me at the bus stop in the morning.  When I received my first new bike with the purple seat and tassels hanging from the handlebars, it was Daniel who taught me to ride it and would cruise along side of me in case I fell.  When I inevitably fell, it was Daniel who picked me up.

By a mere stroke of chance, we had moved to a trailer not far from where Daniel lived in his.  When I say a trailer, I mean barely a two-room vacation pop up.  My parent’s bedroom was at one end, living room and kitchen at the other, and my sister and I slept on bunk beds in what was a hallway.  The entire trailer was about the size of a hotel room.  Not exactly the paradise we had planned, but there was good news.  We were having a house built in a new subdivision.  This would only be temporary.

What was not temporary was my mother’s new found excitement for Arizona living.  She began taking tennis lessons while we were at school, and started cooking again.  Well, she would make what was supposed to be food.  I don’t remember many dinners, I do believe I have repressed those memories.  There were sly attempts at sneaking us liver disguised as steak.  Thank goodness I had round cheeks I could stuff like a hamster with bites of liver and Brussels sprouts to spit out later when I went out to feed the dog.  She would rail against us wasting food, but her logic about kids in Africa did not hold water with me.  I was sure they were eating better than we were.

So, I went to school during the day, staring forlornly at Dylan and during the afternoon, I would ride my bike with Daniel and accept whatever piece of jewelry he had managed to filch from his mother.  Of course, my mom always made me give them back, but it was the thought that counts.  He adored me, and I in turn adored his adoration.  Really the perfect relationship.

During this time, my parents pretty much ignored me.  At night, I would sit with my sister watching a crummy television and thinking of stories to tell.  There was nothing better to me than making my baby sister laugh.  I would climb up on my top bunk, listening to the coyotes outside howling their goodnights and I did feel happy.  I was glad we had moved across the world.

All was well until my curiosity got the better of me.  Daniel was in our backyard and like any boy out in the woods, when he had to go, he just went.  He simply unzipped his pants and let loose in a small ditch.  Now, I was young and curious.  So instead of looking away, I stepped beside him and examined the goods, as any inquisitive young girl would.  I knew boys had different equipment.  I had seen my male cousins when they were babies.

To my mother who was washing dishes and watching from the window, this was apparently a huge deal.  To describe her as a screaming banshee is an understatement.  She snatched me up and drug me by the arm back into the hovel we called home.  There was a belt spanking and I was told what I had done was very nasty.  As I sat carefully on the edge of the bed, there were no tears.  So, I had seen a boy’s penis.  Big deal.  It wasn’t that impressive.

The next day she forbid me to see Daniel.  I told her I wouldn’t, but would just hop on my purple bike and hide it behind his shed while we sat in his room and listened to music on his tape player.  His mother adored me, she would make me homemade tortillas, and fruit punch.  She would occasionally trim the hair my mother butchered so it would grow back normally.  I use to pray she would want a daughter so much she would insist I come stay with her.

I felt sure I could still harbor dual crushes on Dylan and Daniel.  Dylan barely knew I existed anyway.  Well, that is not exactly true.  He did know I existed.  I had become the object of his teasing after I spilled an entire container of black paint on our teacher.  The room was divided.  Half thought I did it on purpose and admired me, and the other half just thought it was hilarious.  Dylan was one of the latter and would laugh every time there was a painting project.  My teacher did not.  I was not allowed to handle paint after that day.

Humiliation burned my cheeks with embarrassment.  Nothing worse than having the object of your affection think you’re a joke.  However, I learned to play along with it and in turn realized I could not at any point take myself too seriously.  In the whole scheme of things, spilling paint was such a small thing and it was actually very funny.  The look of horror on my teacher’s face as black paint splashed her white pants and white shirt was humorous.  Because I did not become upset with his teasing, Dylan actually began paying attention to me.  I was like a boy, he said, I didn’t freak out or cry.  So there it was.  The reason why over the years I would have more male friends than female.  Why I always seemed to have a boyfriend.  I was one of their tribe and they accepted me.

I was thrilled, elated and would sit at recess with Dylan every day listening to his stories of his older brother.  When he told me about “rubbers,” I pretended to know what he was talking about.  The image I had in my mind was not very accurate.  But I didn’t want to show my ignorance.  I also knew enough I could not ask my mother or father.

Everything would have been perfect, except one morning I woke up sicker than I had ever been.  I had eaten my mother’s dinner the night before, and surely that was the culprit.  My mom had a full day of tennis and whatever else she occupied her time with and insisted I had to go to school.  I couldn’t even get off the bathroom floor, let alone walk.  Begrudgingly, she called the nurse who suggested hot tea.  That was an even worse idea and there was suddenly pain.  I remember lying on the cold tile floor of the bathroom and staring at the ceiling light.  If I died, would Dylan always remember me as his first love?  Would Daniel?

There was also the thought of if I died; I hope my mother would be racked with guilt the rest of her life for yelling at me I was going to school.  When my mother returned to the bathroom, she looked worried and not for herself.  Surely, I could get some mileage out of this.

ARIZONA CHRONICLES PART IV

After moving out west, my mother had two moods, depressed and angry.  It must have been difficult for her I concede.  She was young and thousands of miles from home and living with two small children in a confined space.  My father worked all night and slept all day.  Living in a new area with all its dangers could not have been easy on her.

When we first moved to Arizona, my father worked at the Arizona State Prison.  I knew he was a guard and the position stressed him.  I overheard him discussing with my uncle one night the tour of the gas chamber the new guards had been on.  I pictured those old movies with prisoners escaping with bed sheets and nail files and could not sleep at night until I heard my father return from the late shift.  I would wait for him under the table and watch as he ate the dinner my mother saved for him on a plate in the oven.

We all breathed a sigh of relief when a job came open at the sawmill just outside of town.  It was steady pay and steady work and it meant my father did not have to deal with murderers and rapists on a daily basis.  At least not convicted ones.  It also meant he worked outdoors in the heat during the heat and could be at home with us at night.

Due to my injury, I was forced to stay indoors with my mother and my sister while dad went off to cut down trees.  Trust me, I did not like this any more than they did.  I would hobble around with my bandaged foot and spend my day coloring and writing.  It was during this time I wrote my first book about a witch who lived in a trailer vaguely based on my mother.

Then one day dad was home in a cast.  A tree had fallen on his foot, we were both hobbling around the trailer, and mom was losing her mind.  I remember spilling a bowl of Fruity Pebbles on the kitchen table and she would not speak to me for two days.  My father finally read her the riot act and all was forgotten, for a moment.  She was homesick.  She missed her parents.  There was no pleasing her.

Me, on the other hand, ran outdoors as soon as the bandage was off my foot and did not look back.  Summer was almost over; there were too many dangerous things to try before school began.  I was a constant fixture in the fields with my uncles who were barely older than I was.  My grandfather had remarried and had a son three years older than me and the youngest one month after I was born.  They and a group of rough and tumble boys were my only friends and I aspired to keep up with them.

This meant catching lizards with my bare hands, walking the plank over a pit of broken glass and nail riddled boards and jumping off a shed over a barbed wire fence.  I was, to say the least, fearless in my attempts to show I could do everything they could do and better.  What is a miracle is I did not see the inside of the hospital more than I did.  Some of that could be attributed to my mother, who believed in unless you were punctured enough to gush blood, you could walk any injury off.

I did not want to be a boy, I simply wanted to best them.  It was during this summer my hair was long and bleached out and a chore to wash and comb out every night.  My mother was not sympathetic of a tender scalp and would hit you with the brush if you dared to complain.  One night, I begged her to cut off my hair and she was happy to oblige.

I had in mind a cute pixie cut easy enough to wash and let air dry, but would still indicate I was a girl.  So much for daydreams.  Instead, she butchered off inches and inches of my flaxen locks until I was left with a Buster Brown cut that did nothing for my girlishness.  I cried nonstop until she made me an appointment at the Aloha Beauty Salon the next day.

Two things happened at the beauty salon.  The owner/hairdresser chastised my mom for doing such a bad job and I was secretly thrilled someone could tell my mother she did something wrong and she had to take it.  Second, I met Daniel.

His mother was white, but his father was Hawaiian, and he was a beautiful dark haired boy, on the heavy side with a smile that dried my tears.  He told me he liked me in short hair, and I was officially in eight-year-old love.  My uncles told me I looked like a boy, but I did not care.   Daniel had said I looked good and that was all that mattered.

Less than a week later, my mother pushed me out the door one morning when it was barely light out and told me I had to walk down the half-mile dirt road to

Still recovering from the haircut

the bus stop.  School had started suddenly and I was not at all prepared.  I walked the entire way down the road, saw two kids at the bus stop and walked back up to where my mother informed me I had no choice.  There were probably threats of bodily injury if I missed that bus.

Terrified beyond all belief, I trudged back down that road in tears and climbed on that bus, praying it was going to the right school.  Instead of brick buildings usually associated with school, we were led to a series of trailers.  I would be taking class in one of them.  Still disoriented, with my hair too short to hide behind and my hands trembling, I met my teacher and my classmates.  I was an interloper and a specimen to be dissected.  “Tell us how you came to Arizona,” my teacher insisted.
So, instead of tales of beds in the back of a station wagon and a detour in Texas due to a horrific accident, I regaled them with a plane that crashed over water and my father who had to save us all.  At the end of my story, the teacher nodded, obviously not as impressed as my classmates were.  She said, “Quite an imagination you have there.”  I merely shrugged.  She had not been specific she wanted the truth.

As I sat in a desk at the back of the room, someone tapped on my shoulder.  I turned to look into the pale blue eyes of a boy with hair as white blonde as mine was.  His skin was golden brown from the sun and when he smiled, there was a gap between his teeth.  Just like mine.  I remember staring into his eyes as he asked me, “Is there an ocean between Kentucky and Arizona?”

I swooned.  My first of many stupid boys who would blind me with their good looks.  I shrugged and learned his name was Dylan.  Now, I no longer wanted to best the boys.  I wanted to sit quietly beside them, giggle at their every juvenile joke, and bat my eyelashes like they did in the movies.  I was going to settle in Arizona just fine.  Being in love, even meant mom’s mood swings could be tolerated.  If I had only known what was in store.

ARIZONA CHRONICLES PART TRES

We moved to a trailer in a desert with no television, radio or reason to live.  Surely, tribes in the outermost reaches of a Brazilian jungle had better accommodations.  My parents plied us with comic books, novels and a monopoly board.  This, of course, did not take the place of a working television.  I was hoping our “real” family would rescue us from this psychotic set of parent’s clutches.  Instead, we suffered in the heat, whining we were bored.  My mother in her infinite wisdom decided to send us out into the scorching sun so we could no longer interrupt her daily sobbing spells.

So without the benefit of sunscreen, we huddled beneath the scarce pine trees looking for shade and watching the other similarly abused children hide beneath decks and cars until the sunset and we could go back inside for dinner.  The funny thing about the desert is that at night it was cold.  Therefore, you spent all day frying in the sun and then at night you covered yourself in layers of blankets.  To this day, I am not sure how long this torture continued.  I just remember one day we were in the desert and then it was time to move to the mountains.

The Superstition Mountains of Arizona were beautiful, majestic and full of things that given the slightest chance would eat you.  We were in a trailer at the foot of a tall hill and at night in the pitch-black darkness, you could hear the howling of the coyotes in the distance.  Except some nights, they were not so distant.  They were roaming in the alfalfa fields on either side of our trailer.  I would have been frightened by their presence, but I was more concerned about the mouse living in the bathroom.

This trip to the mountains was also the first time I contracted strep throat.  I remember this distinctly because as my parents hacked their way through two packs of cigarettes each daily, I could no longer breath in the confines of  the smoked filled coffin we called home.  One night delirious with fever and unable to swallow, I remember lying on my side in the bed, the light from the bathroom illuminating the tacky tile floor and there was the mouse.  Scurrying along and then pausing to look at me.  I would have screamed in fright had any sound been possible from my swollen shut throat.

A trip to the local doctor, a shot of penicillin and bed rest, and that is where I lay for a week watching that mouse watching me.  At the time, I did not think about bubonic plague or the diseases they carried.  I simply did not want it in my bed and snuggling on my pillow.  Night after night, I watched that mouse unable to sleep until finally I told my parents about it.  A quick snap of a mousetrap and it was gone.  I had been responsible for its demise and I was racked with guilt.

When I was better, we began taking weekend trips into the mountains for rest and relaxation.  For one, there is no rest.  You must be aware of your surroundings at all times.  If you wonder why, refer to the list of things that will kill you.  The woods contained all elements of danger.  Half-fallen trees called widow makers, the tell tale rattle of a rattlesnakes nearby.  Tracks that could belong to any type of hungry carnivore.  A great place for a picnic.

Relaxation is subjective.  I was not relaxing when sliding down hillsides onto trucking roads with my male cousins.  Not relaxing trying to jump over a rushing creek only to slip and fall in and have to drag yourself to safety.  Not relaxing when stepping onto a red anthill and enduring their sting.  There was an incident when I lost my shoes.  It is a miracle I made it out alive.

On a side note, even in the city life was dangerous I told myself.  There was a time when I was following my cousins on a big wheel and they lost me in the dark.  I pedaled around the ever-darkening streets of the apartment complex until a man found me crying and unable to find my way home.  In a stroke of sheer luck that would indeed follow me my entire life, he picked me up into his arms and carried me home.  He just so happened to know my aunt and where they lived.

I began to embrace the dangers of living in the mountains.  There were things you did and did not do.  My hair was bleached white and my skin a golden brown.  I was beginning to get the hang of living like a savage.  Then in one moment, my father helping to put a roof on someone’s trailer distracted me, and I stepped back onto a nail.  A rusty nail.

I remember my mother being angry I was so careless as I sat in the doctor’s office having my wound cleaned and receiving a tetanus shot.  My foot was bandaged and I was told to hop around for support.  In other words, I was house bound in that trailer for another week.  I almost missed that mouse.

ARIZONA CHRONICLES PART DEUX

So, in hindsight, I feel as if child protective services should have at least looked into this whole trek across country.  First of all, we did not even sit in a car with seatbelts.  We bounced around haphazardly on our bed of blankets and hung out the windows like savages across three thousand miles.  It is a true miracle the wreck did not do more damage than demolishing the back of the car and my mother’s already frayed nerves.  This accident was also the first time I ever heard the word Valium, the magical pill that made my mother seem nicer.  Of course, the effects were not long enough lasting.

We were a few days in a hotel in Texarkana that smelled of diesel and fried chicken.  It meant sharing a room with my mother who at varying points was either too hot or too cold.  It was also the first time in a long time we ate normal food.  I say normal because my mother could make delicious fried chicken and about nothing else.  She was infamous for her thrown together casseroles and her guilty attempts at feeding her family vegetables by serving overcooked brussels sprouts we could sip through straws.  She claims it was because we were poor, but I do believe marauding wild dogs ate better food.  When it was announced we were hitting the road again, I remember being disappointed my mother would once again be in the vicinity of a stove.

There were stories of the desert, yet I was still surprised when we were indeed in the desert.  My first memory of Arizona is a Native American adobe ruin and immediately touching a cactus.  The first hour in our new home state was spent picking needles out of my hand with tweezers and my mother commenting how hot it was.  There is not a breeze to be found in the desert in July we discovered.  There is a photo of me, wearing blue jeans and a blue shirt, my blonde hair bleached white and smiling in front of the ruin.  I had yet to receive the warnings.

Okay, so my parents wait until we are driving along a tiny dirty road climbing Salt River Canyon with my mother crying we were going to plunge to our deaths with one pothole, to inform us that EVERYTHING will kill us in our new home.  We should have been given a power point presentation at the least.  The list was endless and frightening.  I half listened, as I was certain my father after days in the car with my mother would drive us right over that edge.  I remember the list being something like this:

1.    Do not pick up rocks.  There will be rattlesnakes sleeping beneath them and one bite and YOU WILL DIE.

2.    Do not walk barefoot outside.  There will be scorpions that will sting you and YOU WILL DIE.

3.    Do not stand beneath trees.  Many of the pines are old and they will fall on you and YOU WILL DIE.

4.    Do not eat any berries.  Who knows what is poisonous and if you eat one YOU WILL DIE.

5.    Do not stay out in the midday sun.  You will suffer from heatstroke and YOU WILL DIE.

6.    There will be sudden dust storms.  Take shelter or the wind will pick up sharp objects that will decapitate you and YOU WILL DIE.

7.    Watch out for red anthills.  They will swarm you and sting you and YOU WILL DIE.

8.    Never play with fire or a magnifying glass.  You will set the entire state on fire and YOU WILL DIE.

9.    Never wander off whilst in the woods because cougars and bears will see you as lunch and YOU WILL DIE.

10.    Never interrupt mother when she is having her midday nap or YOU WILL DIE.

So as the car stopped in front of a trailer, one of about ten in a small park located in the middle of the desert, I huddled with my sister and feared stepping foot onto the sand.  This was Coolidge, Arizona with its barrel cacti and yucca trees and for what seemed like for the worst we were living here now.  If my parents were trying to scare us straight, it worked.